Change Controller and Action name according to language selected

Question

I have a Controller with the name "Hem" and Action name is "Om". And default language i have set Swedish. So route will be on Swedish site, it's

/sv/Hem/Om

Now I want to change language to "en" by clicking English in language section. So route will be set automatically like this way :

/en/Home/About

But functionality should be work of /sv/Hem/Om and In address bar should be display as /en/Home/About

Experts can you please help me out.

Answer 1

You can do this way.

routes.MapRoute(
    "English route",
    "en/{controller}/{action}/{id}"
    new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", language = "en" },
);

routes.MapRoute(
    "FrenchHome",
    "/sv/Hem/Om",
    new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", language = "fr" }
);

or you can do that way:

public class GenericRoutes
{
    public string Controller {get;set;}
    public string Action {get;set;}
    public string Url{get;set;}
    public string RouteName{get;set;}
}

public List<GenericRoutes> Routes = new List<GenericRoutes>();

Routes.Add(new GenericRoutes{Cotroller="bl",Action="cl",Url="bl/cl"})

for(int i=0;i<Routes.count();i++) 
{
    routes.MapRoute(
        Routes[i].RouteName,
        Routes[i].Url,
        new { controller = Routes[i].Controller, action = Routes[i].Action },
    );
}

Answer 2

I personally would avoid this approach for multilingual sites. Yes it is technically possible to do what you are asking but most sites do not handle multiple languages in this way. ASP.net has had ability to localize pages for a long time and I would recommend this approach instead.

Localization involves putting resource keys in your view template instead of hard coding your strings. Then you would set the culture of your thread, usually by the http accept-language header and the site would chose the appropriate strings for that culture to put into the page view. The only thing you need to maintain then is sets of strings for each language.

The benefit for this approach is that you write your views only once. When you have 2 or even 3 sets of views you run the risk of having those versions of your site diverge. I personally have seen this happen and its a hard problem to get back from. Also you get to separate your "language problem" from whatever problem your website is solving, meaning your domain isn't cluttered with boilerplate code to maintain a fancy language switching technique, instead of going with the solution that's included with the platform.

If you are interested in doing multi-language sites in .net the right way I would recommend learning about Localization and Globalization, here is a good place to start :)

Beginners Tutorial

Scott Hanselman tutorial - MVC 3 + Jquery version

Answer 3

First of all, I am not an expert. But in order to route user to different controller you can implement custom routing and configure routes dynamically.

To understand how routing works you may consider checking this link out.

Here is a quick trick to do that:

Here is RegisterRoutes method which register all routes for application

public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes)
{}

1. now get current language from url(get first segment of url (en in your case))

2. query your data source for current language

3. add your routes here from database or any other source using foreach.

.

foreach (var route in RouteValues)
{
    route.UniqueName,
    routes.MapRoute("prefix/{controller}/{action}/{id}, 
       new { controller = route.Controller , action = route.Action , id = route.Id  });
}